t takes a strong church and believing men to translate the Bible; and our age does not abound with such . . . The presence of bad translations in the Church and their use by the people is a serious matter. People do not take the threat
of bad versions seriously enough . . . The seriousness is simply this, that the Bible is the basis of everything for Protestantism.
David Engelsma
Modern Bible Versions
This is not an academic matter, for it affects the wording of hundreds of millions of scriptures which we are distributing across the globe. It is shocking to think that we may have been giving them a bad text.
John Wenham
The Majority Text
The grass withers, and its flower falls away, but the word of the Lord endures forever.
1 Peter 1:24b-25a
It is true that formal equivalence translations do not read as easily as modern newspapers, gossip magazines, or pulp novels; but this should not surprise us. The Bible is not a pulp novel but the Word of the living God. Unlike the modern newspaper, the Bible was never meant to yield the fullness of its message to those who are only willing to expend the absolute minimum of effort necessary.
Robert Martin
Accuracy of Translation
Numerous answers have been advanced over the years. They tend to form two clusters, or camps, and these camps differ substantially from each other. In very broad and over-
simplified terms, one camp generally follows the large majority of MSS [manuscripts] (between 80 and 90 percent) which are in essential agreement among themselves but which do not date from before the fifth century A.D., while the other generally follows a small handful (often less than ten) of earlier MSS (from the third, fourth and fifth centuries) which not only disagree with the majority, but also disagree among themselves. The second camp has been in general control of the scholarly world for the last 100 years.
Wilbur Pickering
The Identity of the New Testament Text
. . . and to underscore the fact that this debate is not one between experts with data and non-experts with dogma, but rather one between experts with the same data, but different dogma the dogma of neutrality versus the dogma of providence.
Theodore Letis
The Majority Text
It can, then, with no colour of probability be asserted (which yet I find some learned men too free in granting), namely, that there hath the same fate attended the Scriptures in its transcription as hath done other books. Let me say without offence, this imagination, asserted on deliberation, seems to me to border on atheism. Surely the promise of God for the preservation of His Word, with His love and care of His church, of whose faith and obedience that Word of His is the only rule, requires other thoughts at our hands.
John Owen
The Works of John Owen, Vol. XVI
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17
Thus there are two methods of New Testament textual criticism, the consistently Christian method and the naturalistic method. . . Sad to say, modern Bible-believing scholars have taken very little interest in the concept of consistently Christian New Testament textual criticism. For more than a century most of them have been quite content to follow in this area the naturalistic methods of Tischendorf, Tregelles, and Westcott and Hort. Just as in Pharaoh's dream the thin cows ate up the fat cows, so the principles and procedures of naturalistic New Testament textual criticism have spread into every department of Christian thought and produced a spiritual famine.
Edward Hills
The King James Version Defended
There is an essential difference between this exercise of power and that of amending a translation; that, in the latter case, the data of comparison and judgment go along with the amendment, at least to every educated man in the church who has in his hand a received Greek text. That text is the umpire, and the reader can compare with it the old translation and the new, and judge for himself which is the more faithful. But upon the plan pursued by these revisers the church will have no textus receptus [received text] of the Greek; i.e. unles she be willing to accept it on the ipse dixit [he said it himself] of the revisers.
R. L. Dabney
The Revised Version of the New Testament
Hence the now novel role of the Bible as "evangelistic tract," rather than covenant document of the church and the subsequent chase after modernity, trying to capture it between the covers of the Bible, with all the ensuing mayhem.
Theodore Letis
The Majority Text
The writings of the rationalistic schools betray this spiritual blight in a defect which the living believer must ever regard as a cardinal one. This is the failure to appreciate and to weigh at all that class of internal evidences for the gospel and for the doctrines of grace . . .The class of criticisms alluded to know nothing of it. They dissect the evangelists, epistles and prophets, just as they do Homer or the Vedas.
R.L. Dabney
Influence of the German University System
The Old Testament in Hebrew . . . and the New Testament in Greek . . . being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal to them.
Westminster Confession/Chapter One; Section Eight
